Demystifying the Mind This feature is the second installment in a three-part series on the scientific struggle to explain consciousness. To read the previous installment and see what’s in the next issue, click here. In one of science’s most iconic moments, Isaac Newton’s eye caught the red glint of an apple as it plunged toward the ground. He heard the leaves rustle in the light breeze and felt the warmth of the tea he was drinking at the time. These sensory inputs streamed into his brain, where they met his vast stores of knowledge, his internal musings, his peculiar brand of c... (p. 18)

By many measures, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook Japan a year ago was a record-breaker. It was the largest quake in the country’s written history, the trigger for the worst nuclear accident in 25 years and the costliest natural disaster ever. Amid such superlatives, it’s easy to forget one more: During the Tohoku-oki quake, the seafloor off Japan’s coast wrenched itself farther apart than scientists had ever measured along any seafloor. In places, chunks of ground slipped horizontally past their neighbors by more than 50 meters and vertically by 10 meters. “The earthquake wa... (p. 22)

On February 2, groundhog weatherman Punxsutawney Phil roused from hibernation to predict six more weeks of winter. Scientists may snicker at people who think they can learn about the arrival of spring from a furry rodent, but researchers aren’t laughing when it comes to learning about human health from animals that check out for the winter. Understanding how hibernators, including ground squirrels, marmots and bears, survive their long winter’s naps may one day offer solutions for problems such as heart disease, osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy. Despite appearances, hibernation is not... (p. 26)

Forget E.T. It’s time to meet the intraterrestrials. They too are alien, appearing in bizarre forms and eluding scientists’ search efforts. But instead of residing out in space, these aliens inhabit a dark subterranean realm, munching and cycling energy deep inside the Earth. Most intraterrestrials live beneath the bottom of the ocean, in an unseen biosphere that is a melting pot of odd organisms, a sort of Deep Space Nine for microbes. Many make their homes in the tens of meters of mud just beneath the seafloor. Others slither deeper, along fractures into solid rock hundreds of meters d... (p. 18)

This article is part of Demystifying the Mind, a special report on the new science of consciousness. The next installments will appear in the February 25 and March 10 issues of Science News.Humankind’s sharpest minds have figured out some of nature’s deepest secrets. Why the sun shines. How humans evolved from single-celled life. Why an apple falls to the ground. Humans have conceived and built giant telescopes that glimpse galaxies billions of light-years away and microscopes that illuminate the contours of a single atom. Yet the peculiar quality that enabled such flashes of scientifi... (p. 22)

This essay is part of Demystifying the Mind, a special report on the new science of consciousness. The next installments will appear in the February 25 and March 10 issues of Science News.When Francis Crick decided to embark on a scientific research career, he chose his specialty by applying the “gossip test.” He’d noticed that he liked to gossip about two especially hot topics in the 1940s — the molecular basis for heredity and the mysteries of the brain. He decided to tackle biology’s molecules first. By 1953, with collaborator James Watson (and aided by data from competitor Ro... (p. 28)

Scientists around the world are closing in on some dirty truths about carbon emissions and climate change. A cover-up is plainly involved; it’s not about scandal but dirt itself. That means soil, the upper layer of earth typically a few feet but sometimes 10 feet or more thick, usually black or dark brown. Below is rock or other material that contains little of the organic matter, derived mainly from plants, that gives good farmland its fertility. The last few decades have seen a string of discoveries that not only upset long-cherished theories about soil, but also could lead to ways of im... (p. 16)

Take a grainy, blurred image of a formless face or an illegible license plate, and with a few keystrokes the picture sharpens and the killer is caught — if you’re a crime-scene tech on TV. From Harrison Ford in Blade Runner to CSI, Criminal Minds and NCIS, the zoom-and-enhance maneuver has become such a staple of Hollywood dramas that it’s mocked with video montages on YouTube. In real life, of course, no amount of high-techery can disclose data not captured by a camera in the first place. But scientific advances are now gaining ground on fictional forensics. The field known as computat... (p. 22)

When Lewis Carroll sent Alice down the rabbit hole, she encountered a strange and twisted land with distortions of size and time. Some headache experts see something else — the possible ghosts of the author’s migraines, which can leave victims temporarily blinded, nauseated, hallucinatory, numb, unable to concentrate or seeking shelter from painful stings of light and sound. People with migraines travel between two worlds: one in which they are having a migraine and one in which they are not. “I’m very brave generally,” Tweedledum tells Alice, “only today I happen to have a headac... (p. 26)